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Anonymity turns women nasty online too: Mallick

Hate spills easily online. It doesn’t flow like blood, it runs like thin red water from a bottomless beaker. It trickles into your inbox and Twitter feed. You stare at it, repelled yet curious. What kind of mind is this, splashing in hate fluids?

This morning, I received a letter addressed to “Dyke Fuhrer” at the Feminist Marxist News at One Yonge. Naturally I didn’t open it — with Christmas presents like that, it’s the thought that counts — but I did go looking for a Purell dispenser.

After that, two recent tweets looked slightly better in retrospect. In a recent column I had referred to the RCMP’s wisdom in gathering unsecured guns in abandoned flooded homes in High River, Alta. The RCMP wasn’t pleased when it was then openly attacked by Prime Minister Stephen Harper for its decision. Harper’s base is armed.

The tweet, from a man whose Twitter art was wallpaper of long guns, said he wanted to fill a bath and hold me underwater until I was dead. The second tweeter wanted to help hold me down.

You expect gun nuts to want to shoot anyone — particularly women — who thinks guns should be safely stored. To them, that’s what guns are for. So why threaten drowning, a slow and particularly horrible death in which, one assumes, the victim watches the killer’s eyes as she dies? I presume this was my intended train of thought so I’ll stop the train there.

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The first man seemed American, so why were so many of his Twitter followers-and-followed Canadian hardline conservatives?

With the 24th anniversary of the Montreal Massacre within range, I emailed Twitter to report “violent threats,” as Twitter suggests. As expected, I have heard precisely nothing back from Twitter, although they have the tweets and can easily trace the two men.

So that’s the guys. The other matter is more complicated. An unsigned email came from a woman reader enraged by a recent column suggesting tiredly that Manitoba Associate Chief Justice Lori Douglas — her nude photos of herself manacled to her bed have been online for years — should finally resign after prolonged and expensive public hearings into her suitability for the job.

Her appalling husband had used the photos, unsuccessfully, to try to lure a vulnerable client of his — a low-income black man — into having sex with his unsuspecting wife. Douglas applied for her judgeship after the photos had appeared online.

“As a woman and a law student I am completely offended by this article,” the young woman wrote. “You essentially objectify her and turn her into a sex craved (sic) woman … Your article suggests that interracial relationships are on a lower standard of morality than non interracial (sic) relationships … you have a responsibility to refrain from writing stories that promote subjective moral standards onto your readers that promote racist and sexist thought.”

“I hope you take this to heart and find a way to remedy your hateful actions.”

I don’t normally read unsigned emails. But a closer check suggested it came from a “natashaw.” Who was this Nat? It was easy to track the writer down but harder to fathom her wild lashing-out at a female columnist — who is by definition subjective — for failing to meet her own rock-ribbed feminist standards.

Emails from women are usually courteous. But this one was uninformed and cowardly. It implied I had contempt for interracial relationships. I am myself biracial, a nice Scotland-India combination, if that assists.

I emailed natashaw and contacted her on Twitter and Facebook asking for a friendly chat, without response. She disguised her accounts and ran away.

It was the anonymity that shocked me.

Like the law student, I am a feminist. But I must say, with sorrow and fatigue, that my feminism does not resemble hers. Women are not always in the right, just as men are not always in the wrong. I’m haunted by a recent remark by a Canadian media executive about women-on-women “workplace violence.” He was correct about female cruelty.

The men and women who email me with hate seem strangely similar. They all look alike in the dark, when I lie awake thinking about them and what they want to do about me.

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